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I had this idea / pet project once where I did exactly this for email. Emails would immediately bounce with payment link and explanation. If you paid you get credit on a ledger per email address. Only then the mail goes through.

You can also integrate it in clients by adding payment/reward claim headers.

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Bill Gates already had this idea. All efforts to change email were already documented 25 years ago. The biggest changes are it is more centralized these days, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, JMAP innovation, oh... and one more thing! It is HUGE!! HTML email is the default...
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Yeah I remember this from "The Road Ahead" which I chanced upon one time in the 90s. I thought it was a silly idea.
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Scammers (and spammers) always got $1! That's why there's a lot of the scam ads on google, fb, apple.

So the paywall email firewall will not work as desired.

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Not many email attacks are worth an entire dollar. It would be very very effective at reducing spam. And too effective at reducing everything else.
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The market currently values your reading of HN comments at $0.
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